exchemist

Seems a very unremarkable reaction. Like @Genady, I don't see what being Catholic has to do with it. Just about anyone with respect for human life would be appalled.

Purely from the SR viewpoint, I presume that, in the frame of reference of the cosmic ray, it is the dwarf that is moving fast relative to it, so it should see it exhibit time dilation, i.e. cool slower than an observer in the frame of reference of the dwarf. However, this thing also has a big gravitational field, so I presume GR may also come into it. But I don't have a good feel for how GR works- especially from the frame of reference of the entity affected by the field it - so I'll need to wait for the right answer to be revealed, I suppose.

Reminds me of the fagging scene in the 1960s film “If”: “Oh, and warm a lavatory seat for me - I’ll be be down in five minutes.”

Total internal reflection, by the look of it. https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zctmh39/revision/1

In my experience glass doesn't seem to heat up to any noticeable degree, and with ceramics I've found it depends on the glaze: the ceramic itself does not seem to heat up. Oil may heat slightly, but I feel sure the dominant process will be heating the water content of the food.

I struggle to see how frying can be possible at all in a microwave oven. It will heat the water in the food only and thus can’t exceed 100C, whereas the essence of frying is hot oil, which is at about 200C. It is this that browns the outside of what you are cooking. I think you are just boiling your garlic in its own juice , with a covering of cold oil. Doesn’t sound very appetising.

This actually raises a basic point about government. If you want rural and remote communities to thrive, rather than die, you have to use some of the wealth generated in the cities to reduce the disadvantages these communities suffer as a result of distance. Allowing market forces to apply to every detail, as you suggest, will increase poverty at the periphery and concentrate wealth at the centre. Too big a disparity will then lead to alienation, loss of trust in government and, in the extreme case, the breakdown of the consensus that allows democratic government to continue. This is apart from the loss to cultural life of the nation when traditional rural ways of life are allowed to atrophy, because everyone moves to the cities to reduce the expense. So there are reasons why one should not do as you suggest.

My understanding is that quite a bit of bread intolerance is due to modern bread-making processes, which do not allow time for yeast to break down the proteins that cause trouble. Traditional bread such as French baguette tradition, or made by artisanal bakers, is a lot easier on the stomach, as well as tasting far better. Bread quality is one of the things that has become immeasurably worse over the course of my lifetime.

No, it just smells of the usual credulity and yearning for mystery and occult knowledge that is such a tiresome feature of all societies.

Einstein’s formula says that for massless entities E=pc, where p is momentum. His E=mc2 only applies to objects with mass that are at rest relative to the observer. More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy–momentum_relation As for entropy, you don’t seem to have a very clear idea of what that is. Nothing about thermodynamics, let alone quantum theory, suggests individual atoms or their constituents will somehow increase in entropy with time. Entropy is a statistical property of collections of entities, to do with the number of ways energy can be distributed among them.

This is begging the question.

Why then do people speak of the metric, in the context of expansion? Or am I wrong in thinking that they do?

Are you seriously suggesting the pressure of a syringe could be enough to force deuterium nuclei together sufficiently to cause fusion? That is insane.

Actually, this is something that has always bothered me too, about the concept of expansion of the “metric”. I’m hoping someone can explain.

90% is bullshit, unless you count utilisation of waste heat in industrial processes. Shipboard steam turbines can’t compete with diesel, which is why they are no longer used on ships, since fuel became expensive after the Yom Kippur war in the 1970s. There is something wrong with those numbers. A huge supercritical turbine installation can get over 50% I think, from memory, but you can’t install that on a ship.

This is not correct. Almost no ships today are steam powered, of any size. The only exceptions are nuclear submarines and LNG carriers, many of which are steam turbine driven in order to run on boil-off gas from the cargo. Virtually all other ships are diesel and have been for decades. Diesels are a lot more efficient than turbines, hence their dominance. A modern large 2-stroke low speed engine, of the types used in container ships and tankers, can get to 50%thermal efficiency: http://marineengineering.co.za/lectures/technical-information/motor-docs/sulzer-rta-series.pdf In powergen applications the combined cycle (gas turbine with exhaust used to raise steam for a steam turbine, often running on the same shaft) can get close to 60%. But you can’t run a gas turbine on residual fuel oil, so these are not used in ships. There are indeed some gas turbines on military ships, usually combined with diesel engines, but navies burn gasoil, not RFO, to avoid the associated hassle of dealing with it. (I used to work in the oil industry on lubricants for the marine and power sector.)

Wot dis?

What hydrogen pressure gradient? And no, it does not follow that that any of this can overcome the electrostatic repulsion between protons or deuterons.

Agreed about Earnshaw’s theorem. But the nuclei are “trapped” - though in an admittedly looser, time averaged sense. I’m not sure the OP meant “trapped” in the sense of classically stationary. Trapped can mean in motion but unable to escape, after all.

To be fair, the nuclei of atoms bound by a chemical bond could be said to be trapped by the electrostatic field of the electron orbitals, couldn’t they? Yes but you are making the mistake of thinking the permittivity, in the region between one deuteron and the next, will not be that of free space. As I said before, these SDMs exhibit a very high bulk permittivity because of their molecular structure (the way dipoles can align). Such measurements take place perpendicular to the plates of the capacitor, or your needle tip and the plate. At the atomic level the permittivity in the plane of the plate, which is what determines the repulsion between adjacent deuterons, remains essentially that of free space, modified by whatever electron density remains between them. No element of the SDM dipoles penetrates that space and so the extra stability they confer on the ions is due to an attractive electrostatic force perpendicular to the plate, not parallel to it. So your calculation, which assumes the bulk SDM value for the permittivity between deuterons, is using the wrong number and will give you the wrong answer.

That's how Jebel Ali desalination plant worked, when I lived in Dubai in the 1980s, using waste heat from Jebel Ali power station.

Except it would mean doubling the pipe network and would create a lot of extra costs for locations far from the ocean. And the waste water would still need treatment of course. So in fact, not such a great idea when you stop and think about it.

How do you account for observed cosmic ray muon lifetimes?

Look up mathematical combinations.

I'm not a solid state physicist but I think you are making the mistake of thinking the +ve charges are brought closer together on the +ve plate of a charged capacitor. It is the electrons which are partially removed, surely, to create the net +ve charge? The nuclei do not move. An SDM will simply allow more electrons to be removed, by the stabilisation of the +ve ions that arises from the alignment towards them of the -ve end of the dipoles in the dielectric. Even if you were able, somehow, make the ions flow freely through the +ve conductor material, I would expect this stabilisation will be maximised when the +ve ions are closely aligned with the dipole ends. This would be at normal interatomic separations.